Ok, I've been pounding my head against the wall for days with this. I'm trying to make my old Sun Ultra5 uselful again. I installed the latest Solaris9 on it the other day just to run cricket (cricket.sourceforge.net) on it but got so frustrated with the broken perl and cpan configuration in Solaris that I quickly turned to my favorite Linux, Gentoo for relief.

After doing a full install from the latest 2004.3 livecd with a totally vanilla config onto this box and trying an unsuccessfull 2.6.10-r1 kernel build (this one hung right after selecting it in silo), I turned to the last 2.6.9 kernel that seems to load at least initially.

The probem here is when its booting up, I get all the usual kernel status stuff but then it terminates booting at:

No other apparent errors until this. I never could get even this far with the 2.6.10 kernel so I'm really really close to getting it working I feel here and I don't want to use a 2.4 kernel at all. I read every inch of docs on this and even Google'd around for an answer for the last few days with no luck. I've tried literally every concievable configuration of silo and kernel compile options and no matter what I do it seems like I can't get my kernel to load up my filesystem.

Yes, devfs and all of the other documented mandatory features are added to my kernel's .config. I'd post it but its huge and would probably just annoy everyone if I did so just ask if you want to see a particular setting.

I'd love to use this Ultra5 as its compact and reasonably fast for what would otherwise be a dumpster gem. It would make a great monitoring server if I could just get Gentoo booted! Thanks for the help in advance guys.

Note: I also emerged udev since the docs reccomended it but it doesnt seem to matter as it cant see the root partition on boot for whatever reason.

I'd hazard a guess that you haven't the right IDE drivers built into your kernel - If I remember correctly it's a CMD643. You need to check the kernel messages before the error to see what controllers and disks/partitions are being recognised.

Yep, that was it. I went back into menuconfig and added the driver for the CMD643 and it boots up fine now! Now I'll have to mess around with the 2.6.10 kernel

However now I have a different problem. After I get past all of the boot messages, the keyboard map is all off. I can't use it at all. It doesnt even look like all of the keys are accounted for in the wrong keymap as I cant actually type "root" to log in and work on the box.

I have what I thougth was the only appropriate keymap selected in rc.conf. Here's a sample of the head of it..

Did you find a fix? I had the same original problem you had. Fixed it with the IDE driver. Now, I have the keyboard map problem.

I recently installed Gentoo on my Ultra 5 using gentoo-dev-sources 2.6.10-r6 and had the same keymap problem. I fixed it by changing "sunkeymap" to "us" in /etc/rc.conf. Everything else seems to work fine thus far; I have the machine compiling Gnome right now. I have a Sun Type 5 keyboard and mouse, in case that matters.